If sages were ever wise in their own behoof, I might have foreseen all this.

Show more

But, out of the whole human family, it would not have been easy to select the same number of wise and virtuous persons, who should be less capable of sitting in judgment on an erring woman’s heart, and disentangling its mesh of good and evil, than the sages of rigid aspect towards whom Hester Prynne now turned her face.

Or, as is more thy nature, be a scholar and a sage among the wisest and the most renowned of the cultivated world.